Matthew Desmond Quotes
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Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.
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I'm from a small town, and I thought I would be a lawyer.
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If we care about family stability, if we care about community stability, then we need fewer evictions.
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A lot of people didn't know just what eviction does to people, how it really sets their life on a different and much more difficult path, acting not like a condition of poverty but a cause of it.
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If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.
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A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.
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When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.
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It takes a good amount of time and money to establish a home. Eviction can erase all that.
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In February 1932, the 'Times' published an account of community resistance to the eviction of three families in the Bronx, observing, 'Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.'
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If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else.
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Do we believe housing is a right and that affordable housing is part of what it should mean to be an American? I say yes.
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There is a deep connection, when we're talking about certain market forces and a legal structure that inhibits low or moderate income families from getting ahead. Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.
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You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent.
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When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level.
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You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.
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If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.
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'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.
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I saw people get fired after their eviction. But when I found that if you get evicted, your chances of losing your job increase by 20 percent, that's when it really hit home for me.
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I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this that don't require massive amounts of resources.
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Between 2009 and 2011, more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were displaced involuntarily, whether by formal or informal eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnation.
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Eviction comes with a record. Just like a criminal record can hurt you in the jobs market, eviction can hurt you in the housing market. A lot of landlords turn folks away who have an eviction, and a lot of public housing authorities do the same.
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Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.
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I teach at Harvard, and focusing on understanding this problem on a national level is a big priority of mine right now - where evictions are going up and down, what cities are actually instituting policies that work, what housing insecurity is doing to our cities, neighbourhoods, our kids.
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Eviction is much more an inevitability than a result of irresponsibility.